Archive: December 14, 2008 - December 20, 2008

Some imagine that Barack Obama is creating a cabinet in the image of Abe Lincoln's, a Team of Rivals, to borrow Doris Kearns Goodwin's phrase. Obama has suggested it's more like a team of hoopsters, "the best basketball-playing Cabinet in American history," including Education Secretary-designate Arne Duncan, who was co-captain...

My son is just on the cusp of having enough patience to listen to chapter books, read aloud over many nights. Much to my surprise, he loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe -- so much so that we read it twice -- but we got bogged down somewhere...

Russell Warren Howe died in his sleep last night in Washington, D.C. He was a marvelous character, an enormously respected journalist and an engaged presence in covering a number of literary fronts. In August, he wrote this illuminating essay for Book World about his friend Richard Wright....

A couple of new signs -- as if they were needed -- that publishing is moving online and that the traditional standard bearers are catching up: 1. The Pulitzer foundation announced that it will accept entries from online-only publications. Sig Gissler, a Pulitzer administrator, said the change reflects the foundation's...

We've reported here on the post-election scramble by journalists to nab publishers for their Barack Obama books. Some far-sighted writers like Jabari Asim, former deputy editor of Book World, and Gwen Ifill, of Washington Week and the NewsHour, already have books scheduled to come out on Inauguration Day: Asim's is...

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio was awarded the Nobel Prize this October for work remarkable -- as the Nobel committee described it -- for "poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy," few in America knew who he was. Born in France, but raised in Mauritius and Nigeria, he had made scant literary...